The Second Sight, page 24
Second, it did not take the Ja’wabi long to realize that many of the Frenchmen they encountered loved Moslems because both hated Jews. They were always talking about a Jew called Dreyfus who had betrayed France. This man, an army officer, was an alien, they said; a danger to his comrades even if he had not turned out to be a spy: The Ja’wabi, of all people, would understand that.
The French learned Arab taunts: “Fleeing and even abandoning their women! Jews! Sons of Jews! May God curse them!” And Arab proverbs: “Only the Jewess surpasses Satan in malice”; “The Jew always comes into the house of the faithful with the money bag or the medicine bottle in his hand.” When wishing to establish an atmosphere of camaraderie during their visits to Tifawt, they quoted these sayings.
The Ja’wabi listened with grave attention. They said, “Twist the horse’s lip with a cord called hatred and he will not notice what is happening underneath his tail.”
—Has there ever been a traitor among the Ja’wabi? (God has spared us that.)
THREE
1
SEBASTIAN LAUX APPEARED IN ITFAWT WHEN MERYEM WAS SIXTEEN years old. He was twenty, a small, neatly made young man with the curly head of a Botticelli cherub. Days before he arrived at the gates of the village, riding a pretty black mare and wearing a flat-brimmed U.S. Cavalry hat with a pointed crown, Meryem caught glimpses of him in her mind as he rode dreamily, all alone, among the snow-dusted russet crags and pied rocks of the Idáren Dráren, reciting verses in a language she could not understand. Because she knew exactly when he would arrive at the village gates, she was the first to see him in person.
Sebastian, still in the saddle, looked down into her solemn face and said, in French, “I had a feeling as I rode through your beautiful mountains these past few days that someone was watching me. I hope, Mademoiselle, that it was you.” He smiled merrily and opened his clear brown eyes very wide, as if inviting her to read his thoughts. She fell in love with him on the spot.
“But he’s French,” her mother said, when Meryem told her of her feelings a few moments later.
“No,” Meryem said. “He’s from some other place, not France.” “What difference does that make? He’s uncircumcised. He might as well be one of them—or even an Arab.”
“No. I know him.”
“From where?”
“From the past. We owe each other something, I don’t know what. Perhaps he was killed before we could marry.”
Dimya, Meryem’s mother, did not like this kind of talk. She did not believe in ghosts; the dead ‘were dead—for everybody except Meryem. More and more, since the massacre of the Ja’wabi by the French, the girl encountered people in her dreams whom she thought she had known, or whom someone else in the tribe had known, in an earlier life. Nearly always they had unfinished business from their former existence—an unpaid debt, an uncompleted revenge, an unconceived child. But this was the first time Meryem had encountered a living person whom she thought she recognized as a wanderer from the distant past.
“Whatever he may have been before,” her mother said, “remember what he is now.”
“He’s the same now as he was before, one of us. He knows it too.”
She asked Sebastian to go riding with her the next morning. They rode into the desert, he on his tired black mare, Meryem on a nervous gray Barb, along the trail that led from Tifawt to the mountains. They started before dawn, and on their way, as the first red thread of dawn appeared behind them, they heard the muezzin calling the salat as-subh. Sebastian turned his mount toward the voice.
“Should we stop?” he asked.
“If you want to see the sunrise.”
“You don’t wish to pray?”
Meryem remained silent. After a moment the strip of ruby light along the flat eastern horizon was replaced by the blinding whiteness of the sun’s rim, and then the entire orb catapulted out of the Sahara. It was the month of June; they felt the heat of it at once. The village lay below them, mica walls flashing, in a valley watered by a narrow river. In the other direction the snowy summit of Tinzár caught the light. Fruit trees and crops grew in bright red dirt on the terraced hillsides in between.
They ate their breakfast—fruit and a loaf of flat brown bread smeared with honey—under the broad fronds of a date palm.
“How did your people ever find such a wonderful place?” Sebastian asked.
“They found this date tree after a big battle, looked down and saw the river, so they stayed.” Meryem replied.
“When was that?”
“Long ago.”
“Where does the river come from?”
“You already know. You rode beside it coming down. Six rivers rise on Tinzár—the Dra’a, the Sus, the Um-er-Rabía, the Sebú, the Mulwíya, and the Ghír. All but this one flow into the desert and vanish in the sands.”
“Then I chose the right one to follow.”
“Why did you choose it?”
“I wanted to go to the strangest place on Earth.”
Without being asked, he told her that he was an American, from New York, that he was studying at Yale College, that he had taken leave of absence for a term in order to be alone, in a strange place, to think. He had intended to ride across the steppes on a pony to Port Arthur and then take a ship home, but in Paris he had read a newspaper article about the Ja’wabi and changed his mind.
The look she gave him was like a kiss, or the memory of a kiss. He was overwhelmed by sexual desire. My God, he thought, something irreversible is happening to my mind and body.
“It was very odd,” he said, “but when I saw the Idáren Dráren, I felt that I’d seen it before. It was red, like Mars, but very, very familiar. Now I think I’ve seen everything before. Even you. I think you were watching me in the mountains. Were you?”
“Were you shouting out poetry as you rode?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Then I was the one. I didn’t understand the words.”
Sebastian smiled; he liked this sort of wordplay. “It was always the same poem,” he said:
“She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!”
Sebastian translated it into French. “It’s Wordsworth,” he said. The name meant nothing to Meryem, who had memorized long passages from Molière and Victor Hugo in school but had never heard of a poet who was not French.
“Riding through the mountains,” Sebastian said, “I had this feeling that I, too, had loved a girl who died too soon. Silly, because I never did, but I would have sworn otherwise if anyone had come along and asked me.”
They made no secret of their morning rendezvouses. Nevertheless the French tax collector, sous-préfet, and schoolteacher, who lived in French houses outside the walls of the village, knew all about them and were scandalized. They warned Sebastian that the Ja’wabi were still savages, that they guarded their women jealously, that Meryem was the most beautiful girl in the tribe.
“That I can easily believe,” Sebastian said. “But we’re doing no one any harm.”
“It’s dangerous, what you are doing,” they said. “We tell you as fellow Christians: if you touch this girl, the Ja’wabi will cut your throat. First they will cut other things.”
“Why would I touch her?” Sebastian asked. He was a virgin and so was Meryem; as he understood the world from the viewpoint of an American gentleman, only marriage could change that.
The French gave him knowing glances. If he chose to lie, how could they help him? In any other place they would not have bothered with him, he wore a ridiculous hat, he wasn’t even French, but here, in the heart of Islam, they were obligated to him by religion and, loosely speaking, by race.
“Remember,” the French said, each one of them in the same words but at different times, as if delivering a message from an all-wise higher authority, “you must ride back through the mountains alone. It can be very dangerous if you make enemies.”
“I’ll remember,” Sebastian said.
In fact there was no one left among the Ja’wabi to be jealous of Meryem. In any other time, some young man of the tribe would have been in love with her, but there were few young men, and these knew little about jealousy. After the massacre of the Ja’wabi men by the French, females of childbearing age outnumbered potent males by more than four to one.
Because men could be kidnapped or even lost in the desert for years and still survive, and because there was no possibility of proving that a man who disappeared was dead because his corpse would invariably be devoured overnight by wild animals, no Ja’wabi woman regarded herself as a widow unless she had seen her husband’s lifeless body. Most were in this position after the second battle with the French. Anxious to march to the Ja’wabi encampment and take the remainder of the tribe into military custody, the French left the enemy dead where they lay. Birds gathered at once for the feast, and at nightfall swarms of rodents, jackals, and hyenas, and even a few lions and leopards, descended on the killing ground. These creatures devoured the flesh of the fallen, scattering bones and skulls, which were dragged away by jackals or pulverized where they lay by hyenas for the marrow and brains they contained.
In these circumstances, no Ja’wabi widow could consider herself a widow. Because the threat to the tribe’s survival was plain, the Ja’wabi submitted the question to the dice, saying, “If the women should remain widows, give urim, but if they should take other husbands, give thummim.” The answer was thummim. Concubinage was reintroduced after a lapse of several centuries, and within a short time most of the women had moved in with the surviving men as second and third wives, not because they required protection or food—the tribe would have provided these things in any case—but because they wanted children. The French, naturally, mistook the Ja’wabi practice of keeping multiple wives as another sign of Moslem orthodoxy.
“What do you do when you ride into the desert with this Gentile?” Dimya asked Meryem after Sebastian had been at Tifawt for a fortnight.
“We eat breakfast together under the date tree and talk.” “What do you want to do?”
“Make love.”
“How badly?”
“Very badly.”
“Him too?”
“Yes, but he never suggests it.”
“Do you know what’s going to happen?”
“I see myself alone. Then with him. Then alone.”
“In the Idáren Dráen?”
“Not always. Sometimes I don’t recognize the places where we’re together.”
2
SEBASTIAN RODE AWAY AT THE END OF SUMMER, THINKING THAT HE would never see Meryem again. On his first day in the Idáren Dráren, he watched a storm break around the summit of Tinzár. A line of clouds approached from the west and collided with the mountain. Blue-white lightning flickered among the crags, and then the rain fell in torrents.
Meryem had predicted this; she had seen it in a dream. Her circumstantial descriptions of her daydreams seemed to him to be a charming kind of flirtation. Everything about her was charming—her small melancholy face, her great green eyes in which he saw her unmistakable love for him, her dark rippling hair which she uncovered and let fly when they were riding in the desert, her thrilling husky voice, her amazing intelligence. But he did not really believe that Meryem had seen him in her mind’s eye as she said she did. How could he believe it? He was the descendant of five generations of bankers and Yale men who excelled in science and arithmetic; no one he knew or his family knew had ever had a vision. He could hardly believe that Meryem herself was real. Sometimes, after a gallop, he had seen her heart beating in her breast and heard his own heart thudding too. Nothing more than this had happened between them; it was inconceivable to Sebastian that it should; they had never so much as kissed.
Meryem had named his mare Tili, meaning “darkness” in Berber; she had called him Seba instead of Sebastian because she said Sebastian was not the name he had before. “What do you mean, ‘before’?” he asked her. “The last time,” she replied without further explanation—more chaste flirtation.
“What about after?”
“I will find you,” she had said.
Now, half an hour after watching the cloudburst on Tinzár, Sebastian heard a distant wind accompanied by what sounded like the grinding of enormous teeth. He stopped his black mare in the middle of the stream to listen. The animal whinnied, bucked, and reared, hooves slithering over the stones in the stream bed. Although he was an excellent horseman, Sebastian could not hold her. She bolted out of the water and plunged up the bank. Once on dry ground she whirled and looked in the direction of the sound, ears pricked, hide shivering.
The sound grew progressively louder. Sebastian followed the mare’s gaze and found himself staring at a narrow cleft in the rock through which the little river flowed. The windy sigh had changed into a roar; the grinding sound Sebastian had heard before now seemed to be enclosed within a louder din. Then a wall of water ten or twelve feet high appeared in the cleft. An instant later it burst through the fissure in a turbulent henna flood. As it swept by, whole trees gesticulated like the limbs of its writhing body, and Sebastian could see the grinding teeth he had heard from afar— hundreds of tumbling rocks, some as big as human skulls.
When the flood passed, the stream was four or five times its former size. Astride his mare, having just missed being drowned, Sebastian shouted, “Meryem, I love you!” How inconsolable she would have been if he had perished! He imagined his riderless mare trotting toward Tifawt as the sun set beyond Tinzár and the jackals and hyenas sniffed the air and smelled the raw meat of his pulverized body. He imagined them trotting toward it, whimpering in anticipation.
As a parting gift Meryem had given him a magnificent embroidered black fleece coat. In return, on an impulse he hardly understood even now, he had given her the material object he loved best in the world, his key-wound watch, made for his grandfather by N. Eichler of Neuchatel, which chimed the hours and half hours so that its owner could tell time in the dark before the invention of lucifer matches. He missed it now, in the silence of the mountains; always before, striking inside his breast pocket, it had kept him company and helped him to fall asleep. Now he would have to find some other way to make his eyes close.
He was wrapped in the fleece coat Meryem had given him; it smelled of the life of the animal from which it had been made, of dust and dung. Watching the moonlight on the snows of Tinzár, he worked out the arithmetic of the watch mechanism. How many chimes in a day? Forty-eight. In a year, 17,520. In sixty years (including fifteen leap years) 1,051,920. Meryem would remember him with every chime.
3
TWO YEARS LATER, WHEN SEBASTIAN EMERGED THROUGH THE VARnished oak doors of D. & D. Laux & Co.’s Paris office in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and found Meryem waiting for him, he noticed her pretty knees and the rows of heavy gold bracelets she wore on either arm, but he did not recognize her. She was dressed like a French girl in a short skirt, silk stockings, a peculiar fringed wrap, and a cloche that concealed her hair.
Then he saw her eyes.
“Meryem!” he cried, sweeping off his derby hat. “What in the world are you doing in Paris?”
“Finding you,” she replied. “It’s been very difficult.”
“Difficult? Why?”
“All I saw, when I saw you, was this door. There are hundreds like it in Paris. It’s taken a long time to find the right one.”
Her visions again. Sebastian resumed the game as if they had never stopped playing it. He pointed to the brass nameplate on which the name of his family’s private bank had been engraved in flowing script. He smiled. “You couldn’t read the sign?”
“No. Besides, I didn’t know that was your name.”
Like everything else Meryem said, this was the truth. He had never told her his last name; it would have been rude to do so, as she did not have one of her own.
“Never mind,” Sebastian said. “Now that we’ve found each other, let’s make an evening of it. Are you free?”
She looked at him without smiling. “Here I am.”
“Good,” he said. “Splendid. What a surprise.”
He could not quite believe that she was here, that the slender flapper inside the smart dress was the same wild superstitious girl he had fallen in love with in the Idáren Dráen. She did not belong in this place, in those clothes. Her elongated green eyes watched him calmly. Was she reading his thoughts? Probably, Sebastian thought.
He offered his arm and led her to a bright blue Studebaker phaeton parked at the curb. “Some friends are staying with me, you’ll like them,” he said, in the voice he would have used in speaking to a debutante from New York. “We can all have dinner together.” He closed the car door behind her and looked westward, as if to study the horizon and prophesy the weather. It was a luminous evening in May and the crust-colored buildings absorbed the last of the sunshine as biscuits absorb cream. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Sebastian said. “Shall we dine outdoors? Yes, I think we shall!”
Sebastian’s friends, he explained, were Hubbard and Lori Christopher, from Berlin, and their small son, Paul; he wasn’t quite sure how old the child was—three, perhaps; he walked, ate with a fork, drank without spilling, and talked quite plainly in both English and German.
“Paul has no French or Berber yet, I’m afraid,” Sebastian said,“but his parents both talk French, Lori better than Hubbard. These German girls are educated to a fare thee well.”
Speeding along the quais of the Seine toward his apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis, Sebastian chattered on about the Christophers: He and Hubbard had been at school together, then at Yale. During the summer of Sebastian’s visit to the Idáren Dráren Hubbard had written a scandalous novel about his family, resigned from Yale, and moved to Berlin for no reason he could think of. There he had met Lori and married her. “Lori’s a Prussian, a von—a baronesse, in fact, pretty as a picture, smart as a whip, charming as can be,” Sebastian said. “Hubbard is crazy about her and their boy.”
